These days, it seems that just about everybody is making use of AI—and not just tech-oriented artists, but world-famous painters, too, from David Salle to Takashi Murakami. One artist who won’t join their ranks, at least for now, is the sculptor Jeff Koons, who told the Guardian this week that he is averse to using AI to produce his art for the time being.
“I do not work with AI at this time directly other than to produce options,” Koons told the Guardian. “Here’s this table: could I see this table in a wood? And then, could I see this shape in, you know, a marble? I’d like to see it in reflected steel. Only in that scenario. I’ve been using AI as a tool, not as an agent.”
Koons’s art is not necessarily known for having a handmade quality, of course. He’s known for producing monumentally scaled sculptures of balloon animals, rocking horses, and kitschy trinkets, all rendered as though they were machine-produced. Their sleek aesthetic is the result a lot of labor and time, and the fabrication costs of his pricey art have come under scrutiny.
In the past, Koons has not necessarily took a stand against using digital technology to manufacture these pieces. In 2019, he told the Art Newspaper that his work had “become more based in 3D, in computer data, in the engineering and reverse engineering of that data.”
But in his interview with the Guardian, he seemed to draw the line at AI, which he suggested would move his art away from humanity. “I’m very embedded at this moment in biology,” he said, describing a conversation with an unnamed Nobel Prize winner in which he discussed chemical chain reaction.
That biology, he added, informed his current show at the Alhambra in Granada, where his work is being exhibited alongside Picasso’s. Biology, he said, provides “this ability to make more out of something. And to this moment, AI hasn’t done that.”
